App stores are huge right now with the 800-pound gorilla and most well known app store being from Apple. Apps are typically associated with smartphones and are small software applications that extend the functionality of devices.

Apps are also making their way into the corporate and government computing world with cloud computing becoming more of the norm thanks to its savings for IT staff, power, and cost to buy. The U.S. government has announced that it has now launched its own app store for government users.

Google will be a big provider of applications in the government app store and The New York Times reports that Google will offer all the applications to the government users that it offers to other businesses, including its productivity apps to replace Microsoft Word.

A blog post on the official White House website states that the government spends over $75 billion annually on IT services for all sorts of tasks from monitoring our borders to protecting the environment. The blog post announced that the new Apps.gov website was open and has the goal of lowering IT costs, which is part of Obama's initiative to make government cost less.

Google reports that it will launch a parallel and dedicated cloud computing system for the government exclusively to allow for security of the sensitive and confidential documents that are produced by government workers. The parallel environment will run alongside the existing enterprise cloud environment that Google already operates reports eWeek.

Google's Matt Glotzbach said, "The goal is to meet the unique requirements and policies that the government has. That being said, it will still be cloud computing in its truest form—a multitenant cloud."

According to Glotzbach, many city governments are already using Google Docs for word processing and many other government entities are in various stages of rolling out Google Apps for workers. Google isn’t alone if welcoming the new government app store; Amazon is also counting the government among its cloud customers.

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